How Does Website Design Impact Your SEO Rankings?

Your site is the foundation of all your digital marketing efforts; it’s where your leads get their first impression of you. Having a good website design is the cornerstone of any good business. The better your site performs, the better it will rank with search engines like Google and Bing. On the other hand, a bad, unpolished website design can ruin the user experience and hurt rankings. As professional SEO agencies and marketing experts, we need to do everything in our power to ensure that our clients don’t experience this kind of negative impact on their rankings. So, we pulled together the top twelve web design mistakes that can have a real and lasting impact on your rankings and SEO success.

Not Considering SEO When Designing a Site

If you’re a small business owner with a limited web budget, it can be tempting to cut corners when it comes to your website design and development. On top of that, many businesses just assume that there’s no relationship between search engine optimization and the website design process. The truth is that website design and SEO are two sides of the same coin. The layout of your website isn’t just about making it look good. It can have a significant impact on your SEO rankings, too. They both have to be done right for your website to perform well and work in tandem to create a winning marketing strategy. Without a great design, people won’t be able to find your site or understand what it offers. But without SEO, you won’t get any traffic from search engines. If you are serious about getting your business off the ground, it’s time to invest in both aspects of web marketing and hire a professional SEO agency. 

Building a Website That’s Not Optimized For All Devices

You might think that your site looks great on a desktop, but what about mobile? There are significant differences in screen size, resolution, and user experience between devices, so it’s vital to ensure your website functions and looks good on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. This means making sure that your site is responsive and easily viewed on any device. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, search engines will penalize your rankings. If you haven’t already optimized your website and pages for mobile devices, consider hiring a web design and digital marketing agency to build a dedicated mobile version of your site. Otherwise, they can also use responsive design techniques to create an adaptive layout that works across all devices.

Poor Site Structure and Navigation

The way people navigate through your website says a lot about how they feel about it. Your visitors should be able to find what they’re searching for quickly on your site by following simple paths through the links and content. Poor navigation can confuse visitors, who may leave without finding what they were looking for in the first place. 

The easiest way to get people to come back to your website is to make it easy for them to discover what they’re looking for. So, make sure your site has straightforward, logical navigation that lets users find the pages they’re looking for quickly and easily.

Heavy Images and Videos

The giant search engine has always been very vocal about its preference for fast sites, and this is reflected in the algorithm updates we see today. Websites that are loaded with heavy content, such as images and videos, can cause their pages to load slowly, which will negatively impact your search engine rankings. This is because Google uses its page speed algorithm to determine how well a site is performing and whether or not it deserves higher rankings.

The more resources your website requires, the slower it will load. The faster your site loads, the better it is for SEO. The Google PageSpeed Insights tool will give you an indication of how quickly your page loads in seconds. The golden rule of thumb is that a site should be able to load between 0 and 5 seconds. A professional digital marketing and SEO agency can assist in making sure your business website is fast and content-rich.

Lack of Keywords in Your Title Tag & Meta Description Tags

The title tag is one of the most critical elements on any page, as it’s what appears in search results when someone searches for a relevant keyword phrase. Moreover, adding keywords to your tags is an easy way to help search engines and crawlers understand what a page is about. It’s also the first thing that people will see when they click through to your site from a search result. As such, it’s crucial that your SEO agency or expert use keywords in your title tag so that it can help people find your content more easily and thus improve your ranking in SERPs. 

Not Including Sharing Buttons on Your Blog Posts

Your website is a reflection of you, so if it’s not up to par, it can affect how people perceive your business and even keep them from making a purchase. Social sharing buttons help increase social traffic to your content and awareness about your brand or business online. That being said, if you want people to share your content on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, include social media sharing buttons on each post or article. That way, your subscribers and visitors can easily share the links with their friends and followers.

Unoptimized Images

There’s no denying that image optimization is crucial for SEO. But images account for a lot of bytes when loading a page and can slow down load times. On top of that, without using the right file type, format, or size for your images, it’ll be difficult for search engines to index them appropriately. This can lead to lower rankings because Google won’t be able to see all of the content on your site.

Make sure that any images on your site have an image alt tag with a description for each and are optimized for size and quality. Your digital marketing & SEO agency should help you with that. That way, they won’t take up too much bandwidth and slow down page loading time. It will also help search engines better understand what the image is about.

Presence of Broken Links

Broken links can cause users to leave a page before they’re finished reading it — which means they’ll never come back. It’s essential to check every link on your website regularly so that you can fix any problems as soon as they arise. Also, be sure to use the “rel=nofollow” attribute when linking externally from your own pages so that search engines don’t penalize your site. Taking the time to hire a digital marketing agency to design the perfect website for your audience and SEO needs will pay off in the long run.

Poor Internal Link-Building Structure

The internal link structure of your site is one of the most important factors affecting its SEO rankings. A solid internal link structure will help search engines understand the relationships between different pages on your site. It also helps them know which pages are important and which should be ranked higher in search results. A link from a high-quality page that has a lot of authority will pass some of that authority to another page when users click on it. In addition, the more relevant links you have pointing to a page or a keyword, the higher that page or keyword will rank in search results. If you have lots of internal links pointing to one page, chances are that it will rank high on Google’s first page for that particular keyword or topic. This can boost that other page’s ranking in search results.

No SSL Security Certificates

Security certificates are now required by Google for all websites in order to rank well in search results pages (SERPs). Without an SSL certificate, Google will penalize your site by showing an “unsafe” warning message in SERPs whenever someone searches for it. In addition, warnings will be displayed in SERPs when your potential customers search for your site online and access it. This is a huge detriment to online businesses because it directly impacts their bottom line and conversion rates, as people may bounce quickly after stumbling upon these alerts.

 Duplicate Content/Site Filtering

Duplicate content is content that has been published on different URLs and multiple pages with slight changes to the text or formatting or without any changes at all. Identical content can cause problems with SEO and dilutes your efforts. It will not only give you a poor user experience but also affects your SEO rankings because Google considers such sites to be spammy and filters them out from its search results. To avoid this issue, work with a skilled agency of digital marketing that can help you put unique content on your website and avoid duplicate content altogether.

Unresponsive Design

The term “responsive design” has become a buzzword in the web development world. Responsive design is often used interchangeably with mobile-friendly websites, but it goes far beyond simply making sure your site looks good on a small screen. In fact, responsive web design (RWD) is one of the best ways to improve your search engine optimization (SEO). 

Responsive design is a technique used by web design and digital marketing agencies to create websites that adapt to the size and format of any device they’re viewed on. No matter what device someone views your site on, it should always look great, load quickly, and be easy to use. In other words, when a user accesses your site from their desktop computer, tablet or smartphone, it will automatically adjust its layout to fit those devices. It allows users to browse the website from any device and get an optimal viewing experience. Therefore, if your website is not responsive, then you may be missing out on a lot of traffic from mobile devices, which could affect your rankings.

Are you looking for a professional and licensed digital marketing and SEO agency to gain traction in search engine results? Autus Digital is a renowned and ROI-driven digital marketing agency providing services like PPC marketing, content marketing, link building, social media marketing, web design & development. So, contact us today!